“I offer two possibilities here. For worlds that are in the virtual only, we can bring a remote terminal designed to be controlled with a local copy of your mind and connected by high-bandwidth wormholes. 

And for physical spaces we can build avatars in those systems to your specification and controllable by the same interface, or you could visit in-person.”

“Ooh! I actually have some experimental plans for a high-fidelity remote robotic interface that I’ve been meaning to test! But the remote terminal is probably more expedient, and I’ll be able to get better sensory fidelity. Let’s start with that.”

She plucks all of the wormholes that orbit around her filigreed core and they settle into a newly built plate of bark and metal. The outermost parts of the plate have a drawing of a flayed human body, about the proportions of Amethyst’s own, complete with skin and muscles flattened into 2D. In a ring around the body are two black circles with tiny hexagonal patterns arranged the same way as a human retina, followed by a thin tapering strip of unrolled cochlea, followed by a tongue and unrolled nasal passage.

“Here, this should be more than capable of allowing you to experience everything yourself. The interface is a delightful bit of skeuomorphism, we refined it based on the perception of some very interesting mind-control slugs -- you just choose to link up your own senses to whatever you like in the drawing, and you can experience the other end of the connection wherever it is in either this galaxy or Triangulum. And if you want to prune or grow new sensory connections you physically poke the edges of the cells in the drawing like this...”

Amethyst grins; it’s not how she would have gone about providing an interface, but it seems easy enough to integrate into her own telepresence systems. 

“This looks great; thank you.”

She moves the ansible to its own isolated chamber, and caresses it with fixity fields. From a new fork’s sensory homunculus, through her comfort and isolation filters (no reason to let herself be tortured), through a distorted input model molded to the shape of the human figure on the plate, and from there into the unknown.

In the growing computing core of her space station, she blinks. A galaxy away, her new avatar does the same.

And she opens her eyes to the world the Affini have built.

Amethyst sees a white everything that stretches off into eternity in all directions. On the floor stretching for miles around her is a stylized star chart showing the Triangulum galaxy to her right and the milky way galaxy to her left. The stars have been pushed around with the most populous ones nearer to Amethyst and the empty or lowly populated systems further in the distance. Underneath the floor sits an undistorted image of each galaxy. From Amethyst’s central position a series of branching walkways and roundabouts weave their way through the stars. The walkways are the same design as those in her station in canopy and above around 20 stars there are floating descriptions in English accompanied by models of cities and aliens and some diagrams spinning gently at 1 RPM.

She takes a moment to orient herself. On the one hand, she could do a lot of reading to try and find a place she would like. On the other hand, there are a lot of star systems in two galaxies. She decides to trust in the power of the central limit theorem.

It is a little strange to her that the Affini have chosen to present things in a way that loosely corresponds to realspace; perhaps it reflects a limitation of their wormhole network? Or perhaps it is just an artifact of people preferring to live in physical bodies, even when uploading is available.

She realizes she's hesitating.

She uses her HUD to pick out a star system at random, and begins the journey toward it. Even in this kind of compressed, abstract space, the walk takes several minutes. Galaxies are big. She takes the time to center herself. When she reaches the hovering star, she stretches out to brush one of its worlds with her fingers.